A Seattle think tank tracking sustainability issues in the Cascadia region appears to be softening its previously enthusiastic support for B.C.'s carbon tax. The Sightline Institute's blog The Daily Score asks in a headline: "BC Carbon Tax Shift: Not as Good as it Used To Be?" Sightline researcher Clark Williams-Derry concludes "good things can come to an end: it takes vigilance and political pressure to keep even the best-designed of policies from morphing into a form that's not nearly so benign."

Williams-Derry is persuaded by the analysis of Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives economist Marc Lee showing that as the carbon tax rises on schedule, it is going from being a progressive tax to becoming regressive, disproportionately hitting "lower income folks."

The Sightline researcher writes that "B.C.'s tax shift, at least as it was originally structured, contained built-in economic protections for lower-income families that stand to lose the most from higher energy prices. That's key, since a poorly-designed carbon pricing policy has the potential to fall heaviest on poor folks -- the people who've done the least over time to generate climate-warming emissions, and who have most to lose from global climate disruption."

Not that Sightline is giving up on carbon taxes. Williams-Derry writes in his blog post that B.C.’s version of the tax “stands out among global carbon pricing policies as particularly well-designed, for at least two reasons. First, it's comprehensive and consistent. Most other policies around the world that put a price on carbon emissions also contain exemptions or loopholes that miss large parts of the economy, or apply different kinds of rules to different fossil fuel users. But B.C.'s carbon tax shift applies evenly to all CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, so it creates consistent, uniform, and economically efficient pressure to reduce climate-warming emissions.”

The Tyee checked that statement with Mark Lee of the CCPA, who responded by email:

"Mostly right. The carbon tax does not cover exports, international air travel, and in oil and gas production the venting of gas. So the tax covers 70 per cent of GHG emissions in total, and fossil fuel combustion accounts for 80 per cent of the total."

David Beers is editor of The Tyee.